The present disclosure relates to seeding user connections in a social network.
In recent years, online social networking services have become a popular mechanism for interaction between users over the Internet. For example, users can use the functionality of a social network to interact with friends and relatives by posting thoughts, news articles, photos, and videos, about oneself or others, meet others with similar interests, and network with colleagues. Users often join a social network knowing their friends are also using the service.
However, a new social networking service can have difficulty attracting users to join. In some cases, this difficulty is due to a causality dilemma where the value of the new service cannot be demonstrated until a critical mass of users join, and where users who are not members are reluctant to join the new service because the value of doing so has not been made clear to them. For example, those who are not members of the new service may be reluctant to join because they believe that none of their friends are using it, and those friends who are using it may enjoy the features of the service but may have difficulty demonstrating the value of those features to their non-member friends until those friends join.